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The three of us headed out Thursday night, January 16 to tackle the Bomber Traverse. I decided to give my new Crispi Svartisen BC/Madshus Glittertind rig a good hard outing to see how they would fare. They did exceptionally well considering we got hammered with snow. But I definitely would have opted for the V8s had I correctly anticipated future weather conditions.
We left the TH at about 9:00 pm and ended up encountering deeper snow than was anticipated. Also started heading up the mountain towards the Mint Hut a little sooner than we should have based on the whim of one of the members of our party. Turned out okay, but we ended up going much higher than we needed to and traversing some uncomfortable slopes. Finally found the buried hut at 5:00 am after one group member performed an impressive 5am 20ft cliff huck in the dark.
There's a door down there somewhere...
Needless to say, we didn't get an early start the following day. I think we got out the door around 1pm to check out backdoor gap. Conditions were pretty white with some blowing wind, but the gap looked to have slid very recently and everything looked and felt quite good so we headed up and over to the Penny Royal Glacier.
Up & Over
The final, windy bootpack...
Looking back down--not much to see.
Skied down the glacier and found the Bomber Hut just as daylight expired.
Double-check the door before you turn in for the night. It takes a bit of elbow grease to get the latch to catch, and we woke up the next morning with an open door. According to the log book, the same thing had happened to the previous group that had been out there (you know who you are, Whiskey Bandits).
We left that next morning hoping we'd be able to make it to the Snowbird Hut, but the snow was coming down pretty heavy. Visibility started to drop rapidly after a few miles down into the valley, and we ended up having to tie a length of p-cord to the end of a ski pole and cast it ahead to make out where we were going.
As the snow continued to pile up we had to reconsider our route due to its final push up a steep headwall that also moonlights as a terrain trap. We decided to take a longer route into an adjacent valley that would eventually curve back around and drop us on the glacier above the Snowbird hut. For the next several hours the p-cord/ski pole fly-rod was your only link to sanity if you were breaking trail--when you saw the cord drop straight down to your right, you knew not to go right.
As it turned out, the glacier at the top of the pass we were headed for no longer existed, so the terrain was super-confusing due to the map not representing current topography and the fact that we were starting to transition from blowing white-out to blowing dark-out. After a bit of deductive reasoning we decided on a route and forged ahead hoping that we were, in fact, headed up toward a pass and not just up the side of a mountain. It got a little sketch-balls when a section of wind-slab triggered after being thwapped with a ski pole, but it didn't propagate, and we were able to skirt around it and back up to what was indeed the top of the pass. From there the GPS got us around the lateral moraine and onto the glacier where it was smooth-sailing to the hut.
Then things really got exciting...
We left the TH at about 9:00 pm and ended up encountering deeper snow than was anticipated. Also started heading up the mountain towards the Mint Hut a little sooner than we should have based on the whim of one of the members of our party. Turned out okay, but we ended up going much higher than we needed to and traversing some uncomfortable slopes. Finally found the buried hut at 5:00 am after one group member performed an impressive 5am 20ft cliff huck in the dark.
There's a door down there somewhere...
Needless to say, we didn't get an early start the following day. I think we got out the door around 1pm to check out backdoor gap. Conditions were pretty white with some blowing wind, but the gap looked to have slid very recently and everything looked and felt quite good so we headed up and over to the Penny Royal Glacier.
Up & Over
The final, windy bootpack...
Looking back down--not much to see.
Skied down the glacier and found the Bomber Hut just as daylight expired.
Double-check the door before you turn in for the night. It takes a bit of elbow grease to get the latch to catch, and we woke up the next morning with an open door. According to the log book, the same thing had happened to the previous group that had been out there (you know who you are, Whiskey Bandits).
We left that next morning hoping we'd be able to make it to the Snowbird Hut, but the snow was coming down pretty heavy. Visibility started to drop rapidly after a few miles down into the valley, and we ended up having to tie a length of p-cord to the end of a ski pole and cast it ahead to make out where we were going.
As the snow continued to pile up we had to reconsider our route due to its final push up a steep headwall that also moonlights as a terrain trap. We decided to take a longer route into an adjacent valley that would eventually curve back around and drop us on the glacier above the Snowbird hut. For the next several hours the p-cord/ski pole fly-rod was your only link to sanity if you were breaking trail--when you saw the cord drop straight down to your right, you knew not to go right.
As it turned out, the glacier at the top of the pass we were headed for no longer existed, so the terrain was super-confusing due to the map not representing current topography and the fact that we were starting to transition from blowing white-out to blowing dark-out. After a bit of deductive reasoning we decided on a route and forged ahead hoping that we were, in fact, headed up toward a pass and not just up the side of a mountain. It got a little sketch-balls when a section of wind-slab triggered after being thwapped with a ski pole, but it didn't propagate, and we were able to skirt around it and back up to what was indeed the top of the pass. From there the GPS got us around the lateral moraine and onto the glacier where it was smooth-sailing to the hut.
Then things really got exciting...
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